


in the foxhole

by leoandsnake



Series: outlaws [2]
Category: Red Dead Redemption (Video Games)
Genre: Anal Sex, Belligerent Sexual Tension, Complicated Dynamic, Dirty Talk, M/M, Outdoor Sex
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-04-30
Updated: 2020-04-30
Packaged: 2021-03-01 23:06:58
Rating: Explicit
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 5,118
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/23935051
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/leoandsnake/pseuds/leoandsnake
Summary: “You can do me a favor, Arthur,” John rasps. “You can take my mind off Jack so I don’t go crazy tonight. And I’ll make you feel good. I’ll try, anyway. Please?”Arthur is such a sucker for John saying please. It’s the way he says it to him — full of uncharacteristic innocence, wanting so badly for Arthur to just play along with him.
Relationships: John Marston/Arthur Morgan
Series: outlaws [2]
Series URL: https://archiveofourown.org/series/1725295
Comments: 12
Kudos: 134





	in the foxhole

Arthur sleeps like the dead for about five hours before waking up with a bladder full of piss. When he stumbles down to the lake to relieve himself, he squints at the bright moon through half-closed eyelids and decides that based on the angle of the moonlight, it’s probably around one in the morning.

He pisses for what feels like an hour; it’s because of all the water he drank on the ride back to camp. Hanging around in that flaming Braithwaite house gave him a scorched throat, just like hanging around in that afire barn after that idiot stagecoach robbery did. Arthur wishes they could stop setting shit on fire for just a little while. His face hurts like it’s sunburned.

When he’s finally empty he shakes himself and staggers away back up the bank, then stubs his foot on something hard. The something makes an ‘mrrnn’ noise, and Arthur looks down. It’s John, laying on the ground in his bedroll, shivering.

“Why you kickin’ me?” John says, like he did it on purpose.

“I’m not,” Arthur says. “Why you asleep in the lake?”

John sits up a little, blinking. He’s in his clothes. “Abigail kicked me out of the tent ‘cos I came back without Jack.”

“Ahh. Well, can’t blame her too much.”

John shrugs.

“We’ll get him back,” Arthur says, sounding more confident than he feels. “You can’t sleep out here, though.”

“Why not?”

Arthur imitates a wolf howl, and John flinches.

“I’m kidding,” Arthur says. “There are coyotes, though, I think. And the lake’s gonna come up and float you away if you’re not careful.”

“Where am I gonna go? You want me to crawl in bed with you or Dutch?”

“Neither, no. Come with me up the treeline here. I got a spot.”

John fixes him with a look.

“It ain’t about _that,_ ” Arthur says.

“I can’t sleep anyway,” John mutters. 

“I’ll fix that. C’mon.”

Arthur is mostly awake himself, now, and he doesn’t really want to go back to bed. His dreams were disturbing. He dreamed he was in Hell, burning and burning, and when the devil asked him to look around at where he was, Arthur realized he was inside the burning Braithwaite manor.

John gets to his feet and gathers up his bedroll. He’s a sorry sight, all muddy and dejected.

Arthur starts off toward the edge of camp and leads John through the woods to a spot where he has a lean-to built into a rocky outcropping, with a fire pit beside it. His camp away from camp. 

“You’re a strange one, Morgan,” John says.

“Sometimes I get tired of listening to you all snore,” Arthur says, squatting down and pulling a matchbook from his pocket so he can get the fire started.

He doesn’t want to say so to John, but he feels safer in the woods, too, where it’s harder for folks to find you and you can hear every little movement rustling in the underbrush. Especially knowing how many people want to kill them, and considering that Jack was just snatched out from under their noses.

Almost as if summoned by this thought, Arthur hears a twig snapping about thirty feet behind him and the muffled sound of two male voices. He whips his head up at John, who he can see heard it too.

“Easy,” Arthur mouths to him. He unholsters his pistol, and John does the same. 

The voices continue, with leaves crunching underneath. Sounds like three men. Arthur and John move closer, flitting through the trees. Arthur keeps an eye on John, making sure he doesn’t do anything stupid in his mentally diminished state of anxiety. The moon is so bright tonight that they can see through the woods almost like it’s daytime. They spot the men easily; they’re stumblebums, likely with no tracking experience, making a shitload of noise.

“We bring ‘em all in, even dead, that’s a couple thou,” one of them says. “Bounty on Dutch alone has to be hundreds.”

“We’re not gonna get ‘em all,” another says.

“They’re sleeping. Easy pickings.”

Arthur steps out onto the pathway through the trees and raises his pistol, aiming his sights at the back of the middle one’s head. No sooner has he pulled the trigger than a shot fires off beside him, from John. The middle and leftmost bounty hunters slump and drop like puppets with their strings cut.

The one on the right wheels around, and John shoots him once, twice, three times, pumping him full of lead and making him jerk spastically before he falls.

“Jesus, Marston,” Arthur says, breathing heavily and holstering his pistol. “You didn’t kill enough folks at that manor? You need a second round?”

“After today? Yeah.”

Arthur remembers again that Sean is dead. He keeps forgetting it, somehow — his brain doesn’t want to hold onto the memory of Sean’s head coming apart. He’s seen hundreds of men die, but not many go mid-sentence like that, dead before they hit the ground without ever knowing what hit them. 

Karen, who was keeping watch, comes crashing through the brush with her rifle cocked. She looks down at the bodies with detached curiosity. “What the fuck was all that?” 

“Nothing,” Arthur says. “Few bounty hunters. I’m sure you could’ve handled ‘em, but seein’ as we had the jump on ‘em and all…”

“What are you two doing out here in the woods?” she says, squinting at them.

“Hunting rabbit,” Arthur says. “John can’t sleep.”

Karen nods in understanding. “We’ll get him back, John,” she says, before heading back to her post.

John says nothing, just takes off back through the forest. Arthur follows him. He’s wide-awake now, full of adrenaline, his blood pumping hot and hard.

They settle back down beside the fire, and for lack of something better to do, Arthur starts making some of his bullets into split points. He glances at John every few minutes or so, but John is just sitting there on a log, arms wrapped around his knees, staring at nothing with his jaw tight like a steel trap. Occasionally he takes a drink from a bottle of whiskey.

“Hey, you’re even more fun than usual,” Arthur says to him.

John waves him off like he’s a fly. “I can’t think about anything else,” he says. “It’s like there’s a hole where my gut ought to be. I keep thinking what I should’ve done different, every single thing I should’ve done different.”

“I know it,” Arthur says. For months after he found Isaac and Eliza dead, he laid awake at night thinking about how they would have lived if he’d have been there when it happened, wondering if he should have taught either one of them to use a gun better, to use it in self-defense. 

John studies him for a moment, like he knows he’s thinking about Isaac, then drops his gaze to the fire. “You could take my mind off it,” he rasps.

Despite their veiled reference to this earlier, it takes Arthur a moment to put together what he means. “Oh,” he says, as his heart quickens. “You reckon?”

“I don’t want to sleep,” John says heavily. “And I don’t want to just lie here and wait for it to be morning, I wanna do something. So if you wanna make me feel good, you can.”

“Do I get to feel good?” Arthur says, dropping his ammo back into his holster.

John sighs. “How?”

“Huh?”

“How do you wanna feel good?”

Arthur doesn’t exactly know how to answer. Nothing’s happened between them since the night of the train job, the one that ended so badly. He thought John was making an effort to patch things up with Abigail, or at least he had been until this latest Van der Linde family disaster. “I don’t know,” he says, because he doesn’t. John’s never offered to take Arthur in his mouth, nor vice versa. All they’ve really ever done is just hump.

John makes eye contact with him across the fire, then tosses his whiskey aside, slips a hand into his pants and starts rubbing at his prick. “What do you want to do to me?” 

The husky way he says this makes Arthur start getting hard. “Shit, I don’t know,” he says, because he really doesn’t. Mostly these days all he wants to do to John is slap him upside his head. That would probably take his mind off of Jack well enough, holding him down in the grass and slapping him silly, demanding, “Where’s that five thousand dollars for those goddamn horses, Marston?”

“Think,” John says.

“Quit harassing me,” Arthur says. He blows out a breath and stretches out his legs next to the fire, so the heat laps at the toes of his boots. In the distance, an owl hoots. “I don’t know. You know what I like to do. I don’t know the words for all this.”

“I think you wanna fuck me like I’m a girl,” John says. “I think you’ve wanted to do that since I was fifteen.” 

His gut lurches again. “You make one hell of an ugly girl.”

John cracks a rare smile at him. “Think that says more about you than it does about me.”

Arthur stares down at his hands, his heart pounding, getting harder. “Okay, well,” he says. “I dunno. I believe at this juncture in time that if Abigail caught me fucking you like a girl in the woods, she would shoot both of us in the head.”

“Might be a relief to be put out of our misery,” John counters.

“I’m not in quite as much misery as you, Marston. I would like to live to see tomorrow morning, if nothing else.”

“Lean-to’s private.”

“I didn’t design the lean-to for fucking.”

“That’s beside the point.”

“Jesus Christ,” Arthur says. “If I didn’t know better, I’d think you’re just about dying for me to fuck you like a girl.”

John withdraws his hand from his pants. “I’m not dying for anything,” he says evenly. “I just heard maybe it feels good.”

“Heard _what_? Where at?”

“In a bar.”

“Who was talking about that in a bar?”

“In Rhodes,” John says. He sounds a little drunk. “I heard two working girls talking. One of them said she had a man who liked fingers in his ass. The other one said, they all secretly like a finger in the ass, or they just haven’t tried it yet. Something about men, they said. Women don’t like a finger in the ass as much.”

“I’ve never in my life heard of this shit,” Arthur says. “Never heard about anyone putting a finger in anyone’s ass. Not even from Trelawny.”

John chokes on a laugh. “Ask him.”

“I will.”

John points at Arthur’s crotch. “You’re hard, Morgan.”

“You keep talking about fucking,” Arthur says. “I’m human.”

“The other guys talk about fucking all the time. Hell, the girls talk about fucking all the time. I never see you get hard about it.”

“If Mary-Beth was walking around askin’ —” (Arthur imitates John’s voice) “— _what do you wanna do to me?_ I might just.”

“What about Sadie?” John teases.

“I don’t look at Sadie like that,” Arthur says. “She’s like Dutch, scares the piss out of me. I’d feel safer sticking my dick in you, if we’re being honest.”

“And I make you hard.”

“You make me hard,” Arthur admits. “Damned if I know why. I think you just make me so angry that my blood gets confused where it’s meant to go.”

John gets up and comes toward him, then kneels between his legs, all greasy dark hair and pouty mouth and those eyes, like a curious fox. He pulls Arthur’s pants down his thighs and starts caressing his hard-on. It feels good. “I’m hard too.”

“God, I thought we were done with all this,” Arthur mutters.

“We keep thinking that, huh?”

“Marston…”

“You can do me a favor, Arthur,” John rasps. “You can take my mind off Jack so I don’t go crazy tonight. And I’ll make you feel good. I’ll try, anyway. Please?”

Arthur is such a sucker for John saying please. It’s the way he says it to him — full of uncharacteristic innocence, wanting so badly for Arthur to just play along with him. 

“You can try,” Arthur agrees.

They kiss for a while by the fire, John kneeling between Arthur’s legs, Arthur pulling him as close as he can get him. At one point John breaks away from his sore and buzzing lips to nuzzle and kiss his neck, and Arthur’s prick throbs so badly that he knows he doesn’t have much time left to come.

“If you want me, go lay down,” he mutters.

John obediently heads for the lean-to, and Arthur tosses another log on the fire, then grabs a few yellow-flowered plants that are growing beside the log he was sitting on. He doesn’t know the name of them, but he knows if you squeeze the flowers, something oily comes out and coats your fingers. Whatever it is, Hosea rubbed it into his gunshot wound after he got kidnapped, so he figures he can safely use it on his pecker, and it probably won’t dry him out like spit does. 

Arthur parts the deerskin he hung from the lean-to to disguise the entrance, and finds John is lying face-down like a drowned man on the bedroll inside, his pants pulled down to his knees, bare ass in the air.

“Jesus, Marston,” Arthur says.

John lolls over and looks up at Arthur. He has the limp and affectless movements of a grieving person, even though his boy isn’t dead as far as they know. He looks shell shocked, the same way he did when he was fourteen and had to kill a man for the first time. It was Dutch who made him do it, and John did it agreeably, but he was quiet for whole days after. Arthur can’t even remember who the guy was or why they had to kill him. He remembers the first man _he_ killed, though. 

“You’re gonna have to be more cheerful about this,” Arthur says, kneeling in the soft dirt beside him. The lean-to reeks of woodsmoke. “Or I’m gonna get soft.”

John rolls over fully onto his back and reaches for Arthur’s prick, massaging it through his jeans. Arthur undoes his fly and pulls his underwear down, and John wraps his hand around his shaft, stroking him. Arthur likes that John has a man’s hands, big enough to almost envelop him. He reaches down in kind and starts stroking John, squeezing the base of his cock in that way that always makes John’s breath catch. He takes it a step further, throttling John’s cock, making blood pound darkly to the tip. John squirms like he isn’t sure if he likes this.

“Don’t tell me what to do,” he says, all surly. 

Arthur wants to hit him for the insolence, but instead he starts tearing the yellow flowers apart, building up a slimy layer on his fingers before reaching down to John’s asshole and starting to work one in. John reacts like a horse spooked, jerking away and grabbing Arthur hard around the wrist. He’s strong, though Arthur has him beat pound-for-pound. 

“Either you want this or you don’t,” Arthur says, wrenching his wrist free. “I don’t much care. I’d just as soon fuck your hand and be done with it.”

John wasn’t wrong that he’s curious, though, and he has thought about it before, just never at great length or anything. He didn’t even know men could fuck each other like that until he saw one swing for it. Not on account of any law, or anything, just the townsfolk rounded some poor bastard up and hung him from a tree for sodomy. That was the day Arthur found out what sodomy was. He didn’t get nervous, because he knows if he swings it won’t be for that, but it did make him rethink his history of lurid activities with John. He had always chalked it up to youthful exploration on their parts, but they weren’t so youthful when the day rolled around that Arthur was sitting on his horse watching that man’s feet twirl. He was twenty-nine, so John was twenty, or something like that. Arthur can never remember how old John is; he tends to think of him as a teenager, still.

“I wanna see how it feels,” John says.

“Bet it hurts.”

“Lots of shit hurts.”

“You ever see cats fuck?” Arthur says. “They scream. Bet it’s like that.”

“I’m not gonna scream.”

“You better not. You’ll make Karen come running.”

He actually doesn’t want to hurt John, though, so he leans in and kisses him before trying again to finger him. This time John actually lets him, although he bites Arthur’s lip for his troubles, so hard it starts to bleed.

“Son of a bitch,” Arthur mumbles. “Don’t do that.” He spits out blood onto the ground. “‘S’like trying to fuck a stray dog.”

“You fuck stray dogs, Morgan?”

“Shut up...”

They share a nasty, bloody kiss, and John shoves his tongue into Arthur’s mouth, gripping his hair tight in one hand as he writhes under him. Arthur gets two fingers into him, and it seems like that’s all he’ll be able to manage, until suddenly John relaxes under him and lets out a choked sigh.

“Do that again,” he rasps in Arthur’s ear.

Arthur is mystified. All he was doing was wiggling his fingers around. “Do what again?” 

“What you just did,” John says.

“I dunno what I did.”

John reaches down to grab his hand and guides it, his thumb in the center of Arthur’s palm. His other hand is gripping Arthur’s shoulder, now, so hard he’s going to leave bruises.

“That feel good?” Arthur says, unsure of himself. John has his eyes shut and isn’t talking.

John nods.

“Alright, well… good.”

“I understand now,” John rasps. “What they were talking about. I get it.”

“Oh. Good.”

John’s started breathing heavily for some reason. It’s kind of weirding Arthur out, how John seems to be experiencing something intense and powerful that Arthur can’t himself feel. All he feels is cool dirt under his knees and hot flesh pressing against his fingers on all sides.

“You can put it in me,” John says, his voice ragged.

Arthur’s cock throbs. “Oh, alright.” 

He keeps his fingers spread out inside John as he uses his greased-up other hand to stroke himself, then guides himself in like he would with a woman. Unlike a woman, John is as tight as a vice, and his own hard dick is bowing forth from a dark forest of short hairs, begging for attention. 

As soon as Arthur is about an inch deep in John and has laid over him to get better purchase, pressing his hands into the dirt above John’s shoulders, John starts rubbing his dick hard against Arthur’s hipbone.

“Hang on,” Arthur mutters to him, trying to get situated without accidentally blowing his load.

“I wanna come,” John moans. 

“You’ll come, hang on. I wanna come too, Christ. You told me I could fuck you, Marston. You’re a tease, aren’t you? No wonder Abigail’s so tired of your ass.”

John grabs his hair again, which is really getting annoying. Arthur slides a few inches deeper into him and is met with some resistance, but then a muscle of John’s clenches around his dick, and it feels wonderful. Arthur lets out a moan, his eyelids fluttering.

“Rub against me like you were doing before,” John begs him. “Please, Arthur, I’m not asking you for a lot, I’m in the fucking forest with your prick up my ass —”

“I know you are! How do you want me to do that, is all I’m asking? I didn’t get what you were trying to say before. Probably ‘cos you didn’t say anything, you just grabbed my damn hand.”

John reaches down again, but this time he grabs Arthur’s ass and guides the thrust of his hips. “Up, like that.”

“Like I’m gutting you?”

He smiles. “Like you’re gutting me.”

“Well shit, Marston, I can gut you all you want, you should’ve said something sooner.”

They fuck like that for a while, Arthur just barely managing not to come, then John seems to get tired of this position and gets on his hands and knees. That goes a lot easier, although Arthur now has to sit up and hang onto John’s hips while he fucks him, which is quickly becoming exhausting after the day they’ve had. Plus his head is brushing the top of the lean-to.

John is making some pretty primal noises, to the point that Arthur has to swat him with the back of his hand and hiss, “Stop squealing like a pig.” If someone comes and catches them in the act, they’re cooked, although Dutch would probably be angrier about Arthur being a dumb homewrecker than about them doing sodomy. Dutch fancies himself an open-minded intellectual, he loves the Greeks and the Romans, and they all fucked each other in the ass, or so Uncle says. Pearson says the same thing about sailors.

Micah would have a field day, though. Most of the men would. They’d never respect Arthur again, and certainly not John. They’d probably “accidentally” shoot John in the back one day, to spare Jack the indignity of being raised by a guy who let Arthur Morgan fuck him in the ass in the woods. 

It’s not fair to say John is squealing, though. The noises are softer than that, more like whimpers. Arthur can’t figure out why he’s making them, because he’s heard John come before, and it didn’t sound like that. He doesn’t like the way the noises make his dick throb inside John, and he doesn’t like the tenderness he’s feeling toward John, right now. So that was most of why he swatted him.

Arthur realizes he’s about to come and drags John flush up against him, so the backs of his thighs are pressed perfectly to the fronts of Arthur’s, and then he releases himself with a sighing groan. His muscles feel loose for a moment, and he’s light, his head empty. Happy. He comes heavily back down to earth a moment later.

“That it for you?” John rasps underneath him, still kneeling in the dirt, though he’s resting on his elbows now. 

“Yeah, that does it for me.” Arthur pulls squelchily out of him, and John makes a sound of pain. “Sorry.”

John rolls over onto his back and grabs Arthur by the waist, pulling him close. Arthur tips unsteadily forward and falls into his arms, and John starts pistoning his hips against Arthur, wrapping a leg around him so he can rub off against his stomach — using him like a bear uses a tree.

With two fingers, Arthur pushes John’s hair back from his face and gazes at him while he gets himself off. 

John looks back at him, breathing hard, his lips parted. “Don’t look at me like that,” he exhales.

“Like what?”

“Just don’t look at me. You always look so fucking disappointed when you look at me these days.”

“Lot of people looking at you like that these days.”

John huffs at him. He’s rolling his hips in longer strokes, now, and he has his teeth clenched, which means he’s about to come. He grabs Arthur by the hair again and starts humping him more violently.

“Hey,” Arthur says, because one of the Braithwaite sons sunk an elbow into his gut earlier, and he’s a little tender in the spot that John is banging his underfed hipbones off of. 

“Oh,” John sighs, his eyes fluttering. A hot splatter coats Arthur’s stomach, and he stops moving, going limp. “Fuck. Jesus shit. Thank you.”

“I really didn’t do a whole lot,” Arthur says, wiping come off himself.

John doesn’t reply; he looks exhausted as he tugs his pants back on.

“You ought to get some sleep, Marston.”

John nods, but he keeps staring up at the roof of the lean-to, his face lit by the firelight seeping through the deerskin. After a few moments, a tear trickles down his cheek.

Oh no. Arthur doesn’t like that at all. He lights a cigarette and tries to pretend it isn’t happening.

“Sorry,” John mutters.

“You shouldn’t’ve drank so much.”

He stares defiantly at the ceiling. “You don’t give a shit, do you?”

“About what?” Arthur says, blowing smoke at him. “What are you always going on about?”

“Me. Or Jack. If we don’t get him back, you’ll just sigh at me and give me shit about it.”

“I care about Jack,” Arthur says sharply. “And Abigail. I don’t want to see the boy hurt.”

“Didn’t say you wanted it. Just said if it happened, you’d take it as another excuse to give me shit.”

“Here you go again, feeling sorry for yourself. You really think I revel in that shit? You see me talking bad about Sean now he’s gone? No, I feel terrible ‘bout all of this.” 

John flicks a tear violently from his cheek. “I want to feel like you give a shit about me after fifteen years,” he says. “Known you nearly my whole life, Morgan, most of as long as I can remember things, anyhow, and you talk to me like I’m some asshole in a bar.”

“No I don’t,” Arthur says. “I wouldn’t put up with the shit from you that I do if you was. You think I’d let some asshole in a bar chuck a lantern at my head? I’d have choked you to death if you was anyone else.”

“I let you fuck me.”

“That was your decision. Did you think that’d make me go soft on you?”

“You’re all soft on that girl you used to fuck,” John says. “The Linton girl.”

“I’m not soft on her.”

“Dutch said you keep helping her out of scrapes.”

“I’ve done no such thing. Helped her once.”

John shrugs.

“I carried you off a mountain,” Arthur says. “Asshole.”

“You had to.”

“I don’t _have_ to do jack shit.”

“Yeah you do,” John says. “‘Cos we’re all you got, and you hate that. That’s why we piss you off so much, ‘specially me. ‘Cos I’m your family even when I fuck up, and you hate me for it.”

Arthur exhales the final drag of his cigarette. “I don’t hate you, Marston.”

John shakes his head a tiny bit and rolls over onto his side, facing away from Arthur. Arthur sighs, then climbs down onto the bedroll next to him and curls up behind him, pressing against him. 

“Lemme alone,” John says, but it doesn’t sound like he means it. He doesn’t hit Arthur, anyhow.

Arthur wraps his arms around John and buries his face in the back of his neck. His hair stinks like dirt and smoke, but it feels good to have a warm body in his arms, somebody to lie next to.

“I don’t hate you,” he says again, quieter.

“I know you don’t,” John says.

They fall quiet, and it isn’t long before John falls asleep in his arms. Arthur stays awake, listening to the sounds of the forest and the embers of the fire crackling.

/

“John? Arthur?”

It’s Hosea’s voice that rings through the trees like a gunshot the next morning. Arthur wakes instantly and rolls away from John, who had turned over in the night and snuggled into his chest like an otter. “What?” he shouts, trying not to sound panicked and angry, quickly yanking his pants back up from where they had slid back down around his knees. He has a little morning wood, so he tucks his prick through the leg of his underwear.

Next to him, John sits up, looking disoriented. He puts a hand to his forehead and says, “Why am I…” Then his face drops. “The boy.”

“Yeah.”

“I forgot for a moment.”

Sleep will give you a blank slate, but only for a second. Then all of it comes pouring back. Arthur knows too well.

“We’ll get him back,” Arthur says. “Get yourself together.”

“Arthur,” Hosea calls again, sounding closer this time.

Arthur crawls out of the lean-to and staggers to his feet, tugging on his boots so he can stomp out what’s left of their fire. “Yeah, Hosea? We’re over here.”

The sound of crashing leaves precedes Hosea before he appears, ducking under the bottom branch of a big tree. “Karen said you went out hunting rabbit, but you never came back.”

“Yeah, we cooked ‘em here and slept,” Arthur says.

Behind him, John groans his way out of the lean-to, sounding like he’s in pain. Arthur wonders if that’s from the excursions of yesterday, or from being fucked. 

“I’m going back,” he says shortly. “Hi, Hosea.”

“Morning, John,” Hosea says. “Dutch wants to talk to you.”

“I bet he does,” John mutters, limping off the way Hosea came, through the woods up to where the path leads to camp.

Arthur looks down and realizes his fly is undone. He does it up fast, while Hosea is watching John go, but Hosea turns his head while Arthur is still fumbling with the top button.

They look at each other, and Arthur gets the uneasy feeling that Hosea knows exactly what was going on here. He doesn’t know how Hosea would know that, or how he knows he knows, but he feels it in his bones the way he can feel a bullet through to its destination before it leaves his gun.

Arthur straightens up and says, gruff as possible, “I was gonna go fishing this morning.”

“Better not,” Hosea says. “Dutch wants to talk to you too, about the Jack situation. He wants to parley.”

“I don’t know what that means.”

“Strategize.”

Arthur grunts. “Well. Guess I can strategize with you, if you think I’d be of use.”

Hosea nods. “I do. Arthur?”

“Yeah.”

“Be careful, alright?”

“Of what?”

“Of being caught in the middle of… things.”

“Don’t quite know what you mean.”

“I think you do, son.”

“No,” Arthur insists, his heart hammering away in his chest. 

Hosea studies his face, then says, “Well, just as a rule, then.”

“Okay, boss.”

Hosea laughs. “I’ll see you back at camp,” he says, and turns to go back the way John went.

Arthur waits until they’re both out of earshot, then starts kicking the ashen logs in the fire pit, the flowers growing nearby to it, anything within kicking range, swearing under his breath. When he’s exhausted himself of this, he puts his suspenders back on and follows Hosea. 


End file.
